The light steel framing market has been improving its floor and wall system products significantly during the past several years. Floor and wall systems have improved to provide better structural performance that allow for simplified installation and provisions for follow up trades. Light Steel Framed walls are sensitive to point loads caused by floor joists, so the connection between the floor system and the wall system is an area where designers often coordinate floor joists to align with the wall studs to accommodate the floor joist end reactions. Coordinating the joists with the studs causes an added complexity for drawing and assembling a structure. Alternatively there are many special shapes that are typically expensive to supply or expensive to install that provide distribution of high floor joist end reactions by distributing the load to multiple studs. A load distribution element allows a designer to place joists between the wall studs so that the joists do not have to be coordinated and located only at wall studs.
Given the provision of structurally sound methods for distributing loads from the floor joists to the walls, to be viable it is desirable that the solution meet the requirements incumbent of a complete building system such as acoustic rating, fire stopping, and fire rating. A joist system that is intended for the framing market would be substantially bottom chord bearing or substantially web bearing in order to suit traditional framing protocols. The connection between the floor and the wall entails many design details that should be accommodated to provide a complete floor and wall framing system. The complete floor to wall connection should include as a minimum the following: (1) load distribution capability, (2) a connection that provides flexibility for onsite construction tolerances, (3) fire stopping capabilities, (4) acoustic performance capabilities, (5) provisions for rated sheathing membrane installation, (6) provisions for directly transferring floor diaphragm to the walls, and (7) ease of fabrication, shipping and installation. This invention includes various methods to provide a complete building system approach for a joist system for web and bottom chord framing.